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  #1  
Unread 08-24-2021, 11:44 AM
Allen Tice's Avatar
Allen Tice Allen Tice is offline
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Default New Book. I don't want to clobber you with hype, yet...

New Book

Just three days ago (21 August 21) I received my proof copy of my 100 page first book of verse called Of Course, which will be available from the publisher, Kelsay Books, and on Amazon for approximately $20.00 within a month or so. I will make a further announcement when it's actually "out there." Much of Of Course, was critiqued on Eratosphere, and much of my original material is traditional, even old-fashioned, along with some Latin, Greek, and German translations, and one translation each from Spanish and Chinese. There are nice dust jacket blurbs by a Columbia University classics professor and the British poet Michael Hulse on the back cover:

“That cheering you hear is the blessèd in the Elysian fields rejoicing that at last there’s a poet worth reading once again. Allen Tice has informed poise and wit in a time that has almost forgotten such qualities. A classical temperament in an age of ketchup and supermodels, he has language, and languages, and the riches of poetry, at his fingertips. These poems simply fizz with the fun of it all.

Michael Hulse, editor of Stand, Leviathan Quarterly and The Warwick Review, and co-editor of The Twentieth Century in Poetry.”

————

“Tice’s literary translations combine grace with wit and sober style with sparkle while also capturing the seriousness that underlies the ease of flow in a Horace or a Sappho. Verve and dash lend pace and color to Tice’s verses, but only as further adornments to his Muse’s defining gravitas.

Gareth D. Williams, Columbia University Department of Classics.”
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  #2  
Unread 08-24-2021, 11:45 AM
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Ann Drysdale Ann Drysdale is offline
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Keep us informed, Allen.
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  #3  
Unread 08-24-2021, 11:56 AM
W T Clark W T Clark is offline
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Con
grat
u
la
tions Allen (is this the right thread of the two?) Could you tell a little more about "old fashioned"?
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  #4  
Unread 08-24-2021, 12:47 PM
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OK, W. T., by "old-fashioned" I mean to convey to strangers or lurkers on Eratosphere that there's a lot of attention to meter in many of the contents, and to a slightly lesser extent, attention to rhyme. And that's what we do here, many of us, so not much is new with that. But the meters that I have been working with are mostly ones that are overlooked by many: stress-based English language alcaics, asclepiads, and dactylic hexameters, for example, and one of my own invention that takes what I think are the best parts of an alcaic and an asclepiad and puts them together so it rolls right along with a bit of rumble in English. They have not been so easy to do in 20th and 21st century American English. 19th century British academic classicists often did alcaics in English with pretty good results. (Parenthetically, these meters are much easier to pull off in German owing to the significantly different history of the two languages.) It can be done. But I studied the Latin poet Valerius Catullus in my early and middle teens when I was very impressionable and madly in love with a certified gold-plated genius, and Catullus' work (#51) with a poem of Sappho (#31) led me to translate the same Greek item in Sappho's meter, and even try to complete the abbreviated last stanza so that it made some kind of sense. So "old-fashioned" can mean old-fashioned (2,000 years and much more), as well as very pre-free verse. There is a free verse item from my college days, and a much more recent prose poem or two.

I still can do free verse and have scaffolds for some from various periods. Iambic pentameter is so highly refined that I do it when feeling rather brave. There is iambic verse with rhyme in this book too.
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Unread 08-24-2021, 01:48 PM
W T Clark W T Clark is offline
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Ah, so old-fashioned only to those of the poetic establishment that — have — for some unreason — discredited meter. Anyway, to be in-fashion is to be boring. Hölderlin-us back into the alcaic!
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  #6  
Unread 08-24-2021, 02:49 PM
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Sarah-Jane Crowson Sarah-Jane Crowson is offline
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Congratulations! I look forward to being able to buy and read the book once it's out.

Sarah-Jane
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Unread 08-24-2021, 03:40 PM
Chris O'Carroll Chris O'Carroll is offline
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Rock on, Allen. Let us know when we can send, you know, not just huzzahs but actual cash for a copy.
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Unread 08-24-2021, 04:30 PM
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Thanks Ann, S-J, and Chris,

W.T.:
Beyond Hölderlin, if you can cut the mustard of the old German "gothic" typeface, occasional faint pages, and crapped last lines on each page (how shitty), I also recommend the "Homers Ilias", a Scholar Select photocopied hardbound metrical German translation of the Iliad by Johann Heinrich Voss (ISBN 978-3-7306-0605-6).

I got it from Anacondaverlag.de, a German firm, via VSB Verlagsservice Brauschweig GmbH, Postfach 4738-3807, Braunschweig, Germany, who were very picky about how to pay for it. I don't have a German bank account. I finally used a blank payee left-over Travelers Check concealed in a greeting card that left a handsome windage beyond the list price. An expat German-born professor at Columbia University helped me a bit with this.

Those ruined last lines on each page are such a piece of schlomperei that I almost crapped when I got the otherwise more or less forgivable volume.

It's a very good and famous translation, and practice with the typeface helps. My granddad's Bibel gives me a big headstart. Voss swings.
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Unread 08-25-2021, 06:51 AM
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Wow! Gotta spring for this one. Congrats, Allen!
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  #10  
Unread 08-25-2021, 01:44 PM
David Callin David Callin is offline
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That's a great blurb from Michael Hulse, Allen. Congratulations.

David
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